Cigarettes Will Kill You is a crucial document of the Australian alternative music scene, but more importantly a twisted love song that those who grew up in the 90s have kept close to their hearts for nearly 20 years.

Its writer Ben Lee had recently left Noise Addict, the band he joined as a 13-year-old. The song, released in 1998, was the first in a slew of solo tracks that he would release to commercial acclaim, and remained one of his best.

Devastatingly sad and perfectly executed, it would become a signpost for where alternative rock would head in the new millennium. You can hear shades of Lee’s renewed brand of melancholy, with its emphasis on electronic production and keyboards, on many other great Australian hits that came after it, including Eskimo Joe’s From The Sea and Grinspoon’s Chemical Heart.

A good pop song typically contains one memorable instrument or hook that leads to instant recall among listeners. Cigarettes Will Kill You boasts three: moving piano chords, a slightly off-kilter, hip-hop inspired drum groove, and Lee’s chorus lyric. The song’s smooth breaks and stabbing left-hand ostinatos that propel them forward make for unlikely bedfellows. But like everything about Lee’s incongruous career, it seems to work.

By the time this song became a hit for Ben Lee, he was already an industry veteran with two albums, four EPs and an internationally signed band, Noise Addict, trailing dust behind him. He was also only 20 years old.

Australian rock music was split down the middle in the 90s, between locals who wanted to keep the pub rock spirit alive and a new breed who were happy to sound American if it let them tour over there. Lee, who lived overseas but couldn’t shake his thick accent, sat somewhere in the middle. But once he opened that mouth of his on the killer chorus, there was no doubting where this Bondi boy was from.

Lee was not the first songwriter to rue the day he met someone that broke his heart, but he was refreshingly frank about it. Cigarettes Will Kill You, inspired by The Verve’s The Drugs Don’t Work (despite having nothing at all to do with cancer sticks) concerned itself mostly with calling out an injurious lover. Every line Lee sang in the verses sounded like a snarl, made all the more potent given that many of his metaphors (“You love to watch me bake / You serve me up with cake / And that’s your big mistake”) were about food.

Even though its strength is derived from anger (“You offer a la carte / You didn’t have the heart”), the most memorable parts of the song are marked by beauty. It’s those close-knit harmonies that drop in on the lust-filled chorus opener “and I / want a TV embrace”, and the upper octaves that sound out the bridge. It showcased Lee not just as a punk with a good ear, but also having a knack for melody that would serve him well into the next decade.

Stephen Pavlovic, who went on to found one of Australia’s most influential record labels, Modular Records, is known for his golden ears and consistently picking winners. Ben Lee was his first ever signing, after he famously saw Noise Addict play at a library book sale. Cigarettes Will Kill You was proof of concept then, and remains so now. It’s simple, wry and memorable; four descending bass notes, a jilted lover bashing out minor chords and one too many references (“You left me burned and seared”) to cooking.

The east coast of Australia has had its fair share of child prodigies. From “Tiny Tina Arena” busting out ballads on live TV before she’d hit puberty to Daniel Johns touring the US as a 15-year-old, we’re pretty good at picking them young. But few have undergone an adolescence as tumultuous as Lee; jaded by 18, chart-topper at 20 and being called a “precocious cunt” by Bernard Fanning before he was even legally allowed to drink in his adopted home of New York City.

That Lee has had at least three career turnarounds in his relatively short life is no accident. Every time it seems like he’s gone too far into the wilderness, he pulls another great melody from God knows where and kicks into gear again. He’s been reborn as a life coach for unhappy people (Catch My Disease, We’re All In This Together), introspective sex guru (Birds and Bees), and recently wrote an entire album about the benefits of getting high from the psychedelic Peruvian brew ayahuasca. Each of them has allowed him a few more years to live out this song’s refrain: “I wish I could say that everyone was wrong.”

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